1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to an information processing device, an information processing method, and a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known that an association function can be performed by combining the services provided by network devices which are connected together via a network. For example, an OCR (optical character recognition) service provided by a certain device (A) can be performed by not only the device (A) but also other devices which are connected to the device (A) via a network. An association function to scan a document and perform an OCR process can be performed by combining a scanning service provided by a device (B) and the OCR service provided by the device (A). There is known a method of evaluating such an association function on a service receiving device which makes use of the services provided by the network devices.
However, the known service evaluation method does not provide an evaluation result in which the input/output requirements of the services provided are taken into consideration. The input/output requirements are necessary conditions for performing the service input and output operations. For example, in a case of the OCR service, one of the input requirements is that an image with an image format which is one of PDF (portable document format), TIFF (tagged image file format), and JPG (joint photographic expert group) is to be received as the input image. In this case, however, the service receiving device which uses the OCR service does not necessarily use all the input image formats of PDF, TIFF, and JPG. If the evaluation is performed without taking the input/output requirements of the service into consideration, the evaluation process may be performed for services which are not used by the service receiving device. Consequently, there is a problem that an unnecessary evaluation process is performed.
To eliminate the problem, various proposals have been made. For example, see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2008-148109.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2008-148109 discloses an image processing device which registers other image processing devices to be associated with the image processing device via a network. When a new image processing device is connected on the network, the image processing device acquires function information indicating the functions of the new image processing device and compares the acquired function information with its own function information. When a new image processing device having new functions which are not included in its own function information is connected on the network, the image processing device registers the new image processing device.
However, there is no disclosure in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2008-148109 of evaluating only the services used and making the evaluation process into the necessary minimum in order to solve the above problem.